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Anna Alchuk
Anna Alchuk (28 March 1955 – 21 March 2008) was a Russian poet and visual artist. An admirer summarized her work as "a free-spirited romp across complex and significant ideas about personhood, identity, representation, linguistic performance, and political action."
She was married for 33 years to the philosopher Michail Ryklin. At the time of her death the couple were living in Berlin where Ryklin was employed as a visiting professor at the university. The assessment that Alchuk's death had been a suicide was generally accepted, but did not go entirely unquestioned.
Anna Alchuk was the name under which she worked as an artist, and by which she is identified in many English language sources. However, fuller variants of her name are also used in some sources.
Anna Alchuk Mikhalchuk (А́нна Алекса́ндровна Михальчу́к) was born into a Jewish family in Bosjnjakovo in the Sakhalin Oblast in the Soviet Far East. Her parents were working on Sakhalin as geologists. Anna grew up in another rich mining region, in Vorkuta in the North Urals. She identified with her grandmother whom she never met, since the old lady spent the last thirty years of her life locked away in a psychiatric institution.
In 1973 she met Michail Ryklin whom she married in 1975. While Ryklin worked for his doctorate which focused on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, between 1973 and 1978 Alchuk studied History at Lomonosov University (as Moscow's principal university was known at that time). During the build-up to the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1987 and 1988 she was a co-publisher of the samizdat publications "Paradigma" ("Парадигма") and "MDP" ("МДП"). In 1983 Alchuk's mother, Maja Koljada, had been denounced and accused of "spreading untrue facts, contrary to better knowledge, which denigrate the Soviet state and social system". Koljada had been sent away to a labour camp hundreds of kilometers away from her family.
Towards the end of the 1980s she got together with a group of Moscow artists and conceptualist poets, to take part in the exhibitions of the new conceptual art movement. Later she participated in music and poetry stage performances, for instance with the cult musician Sergey Letov and the Three-O group. Her own first volume of poetry was published in 1994. During this period she was the organiser of numerous exhibitions and performances in which music and poetry were combined.
Alchuk was a member of the Russian section of PEN International and of the Academy of Zaum. Her poems and visual works were reproduced in Draft (almanac) (a Russian language literary almanac published annually in New York) and New Literary Review. Her essays and articles featured in leading Russian journals, including Foreign Literature. She was the editor-compiler of a collection of articles entitled "Женщина и визуальные знаки" ("Woman and visual signs") which appeared in 2000. During the final years of the twentieth century, hers became an increasingly international presence in the contemporary arts world, featuring in exhibitions not just in Russia, but also in Britain, Germany, Hungary and Sweden.
Life turned bitter early in 2003. In January an exhibition opened in Moscow under the challenging title Watch out: Religion. The focus of the exhibition was on the church. A few days after it opened, on 18 January, the exhibition was trashed by six people purporting to represent Christian Orthodox believers. The works of the 40 exhibitors were destroyed with paint. A statement appeared on the wall: "May you be damned". Two of the vandals, Lyukshin and Zyakin, were arrested at the scene and a criminal trial took place. What appalled many in Russia and, as news of the trial spread, many international observers, was that the authorities proceeded not against the vandals but against the exhibition organisers, Yuri Samodurov and Ludmila Vasilovskaya. A third person was on trial, one of the more high-profile exhibitors, Anna Alchuk Mikhalchuk. (On 23 August 2003 a Moscow court determined that Lyukshin and Zyakin had no case to answer.)
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Anna Alchuk
Anna Alchuk (28 March 1955 – 21 March 2008) was a Russian poet and visual artist. An admirer summarized her work as "a free-spirited romp across complex and significant ideas about personhood, identity, representation, linguistic performance, and political action."
She was married for 33 years to the philosopher Michail Ryklin. At the time of her death the couple were living in Berlin where Ryklin was employed as a visiting professor at the university. The assessment that Alchuk's death had been a suicide was generally accepted, but did not go entirely unquestioned.
Anna Alchuk was the name under which she worked as an artist, and by which she is identified in many English language sources. However, fuller variants of her name are also used in some sources.
Anna Alchuk Mikhalchuk (А́нна Алекса́ндровна Михальчу́к) was born into a Jewish family in Bosjnjakovo in the Sakhalin Oblast in the Soviet Far East. Her parents were working on Sakhalin as geologists. Anna grew up in another rich mining region, in Vorkuta in the North Urals. She identified with her grandmother whom she never met, since the old lady spent the last thirty years of her life locked away in a psychiatric institution.
In 1973 she met Michail Ryklin whom she married in 1975. While Ryklin worked for his doctorate which focused on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, between 1973 and 1978 Alchuk studied History at Lomonosov University (as Moscow's principal university was known at that time). During the build-up to the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1987 and 1988 she was a co-publisher of the samizdat publications "Paradigma" ("Парадигма") and "MDP" ("МДП"). In 1983 Alchuk's mother, Maja Koljada, had been denounced and accused of "spreading untrue facts, contrary to better knowledge, which denigrate the Soviet state and social system". Koljada had been sent away to a labour camp hundreds of kilometers away from her family.
Towards the end of the 1980s she got together with a group of Moscow artists and conceptualist poets, to take part in the exhibitions of the new conceptual art movement. Later she participated in music and poetry stage performances, for instance with the cult musician Sergey Letov and the Three-O group. Her own first volume of poetry was published in 1994. During this period she was the organiser of numerous exhibitions and performances in which music and poetry were combined.
Alchuk was a member of the Russian section of PEN International and of the Academy of Zaum. Her poems and visual works were reproduced in Draft (almanac) (a Russian language literary almanac published annually in New York) and New Literary Review. Her essays and articles featured in leading Russian journals, including Foreign Literature. She was the editor-compiler of a collection of articles entitled "Женщина и визуальные знаки" ("Woman and visual signs") which appeared in 2000. During the final years of the twentieth century, hers became an increasingly international presence in the contemporary arts world, featuring in exhibitions not just in Russia, but also in Britain, Germany, Hungary and Sweden.
Life turned bitter early in 2003. In January an exhibition opened in Moscow under the challenging title Watch out: Religion. The focus of the exhibition was on the church. A few days after it opened, on 18 January, the exhibition was trashed by six people purporting to represent Christian Orthodox believers. The works of the 40 exhibitors were destroyed with paint. A statement appeared on the wall: "May you be damned". Two of the vandals, Lyukshin and Zyakin, were arrested at the scene and a criminal trial took place. What appalled many in Russia and, as news of the trial spread, many international observers, was that the authorities proceeded not against the vandals but against the exhibition organisers, Yuri Samodurov and Ludmila Vasilovskaya. A third person was on trial, one of the more high-profile exhibitors, Anna Alchuk Mikhalchuk. (On 23 August 2003 a Moscow court determined that Lyukshin and Zyakin had no case to answer.)